Goodbye Puppy

Tuesday morning, I woke up and walked into my living room to let my dog out to use the bathroom. I was not greeted by the usual clacking of his thick nails on my wooden floors. My feet were not licked from the mere joy of seeing me. I stood alone in my living room, surrounded by a darkness attempting to be penetrated by the lights of early morning. He was gone.

For over 10 years, Cole was the only constant in my life. He was the only boy that I kept around for long enough to call mine. After work, he would greet me with large barks from his tiny body and an excited running back and forth that made no sense and had no destination other than me. He would annoyingly beg for food on the rare occasions that we ate at the dinner table. He would vigorously shake a noisy toy as if it was a piñata filled with steak that he needed to release. He sat at my feet as I studied for the Bar. Both times. Quietly encouraging me and comforting me when I could barely believe in myself. He filled my lap and let his fur soak up my tears when my then love lost his life in a horrific way. And on Monday evening, he quietly looked at me from the arms of someone else as I kissed him goodbye and walked away forever.

It’s interesting the habits that we develop without realizing it. Every time I walk into the kitchen, my eyes automatically go to the small space that used to be filled with one of his many beds. So many beds. That lady must have thought we were crazy with giving her so many beds. As I go deeper in, my eyes search to see if he has any food in his bowls. She has those, too.

When I first moved to Ireland, I used to think he was with me. Children would scream outside and I would expect to hear him bark. I would walk around and expect to feel him nip at my feet. I would hear the wind howling and think it carried with it the sound of him whining. He wasn’t doing any of those things. He was here. Without me. Now, he is somewhere else without me.

I wonder if he’s thinking about me. I wonder if he thinks he did something wrong. “Why did someone else abandon me? I thought this one was going to keep me. She loved me for so long. She snuggled me and let me sleep in her bed. She dressed me up in costumes when her silly football team had games. Her sister put sweaters on me when she would walk me in the cold. Why didn’t they want me?” I hope that’s not what he’s thinking. I hope he knows how much I have loved him.

I hope she’s being nice to him. I hope she’s being nice to my dog. I never actually expected that the day would come when he wasn’t running amok around my house (Amok! Amok! Amok!), or licking random things, or driving me crazy because he peed on something. Or standing at the sliding glass doors with his back rigid and his ears perked up and his drumstick legs straight as needles as he barked at a cat that had bravely ventured into our yard.

My dog used to do the funniest things. Although, I guess he’s not my dog anymore.

Nighttime Realizations

It is 10:51 p.m., late in the Tuesday hours. In the corner of my bedroom is a dim light, turning the air into a faded orange against the darkness of this ordinary night. There is a tightness around my eyes that comes from an exhaustion that only a mother knows when vainly attempting to find comfort in her pillow. Three feet away, Little Miss begins to shuffle around in her tiny version of a bed. These not-so-gentle movements can only mean one thing: she needs me.

I get up and reach in gently, smiling at her open eyes that merely look like bottomless black holes in the distance beyond my eyesight's abilities. But I don't need to be able to see to know that she needs me.

As she latches on for the first of many nighttime cravings, I look down at her tiny head with its streaks of black (and hopefully straight) hair. I think of the bewildered smile on her face earlier that evening as I gave her a bath with delightfully warm and comforting water but not yet any rubber ducky. I notice her tiny nose and think of the gargantuan boogers it somehow houses, growing deep in the tunnels of her sweet kissable nostrils. She seems content to keep them and puts up quite a fight at my attempts to free them from their tiny cave. But to get rid of them, to breathe properly, she needs me.

I look down at her tiny hand, spread out on my chest, grasping on to my tired, spit-covered shirt. There is a little dimple at the base of each of her fingers, where they meet that hand that so lovingly grasps onto mine. I gaze at her paper thin fingernails and remember how they were long and razor sharp on the day she made her escape. I think of how I carefully, and apprehensively, cut her nails in her sleep, wondering which movement will rouse her as I try to protect her from ruining her sweet face. I look at the place she had scratched herself earlier and know that, to prevent those red angry lines, she needs me.

My body sustains hers.
My body nourishes hers.

My body produces, on its own, without any effort on my part, all she needs to be properly fed. I watch her inhale this food. I see the milk drip down her face and soak my shirt. I hear her gulping it in and swallowing it quickly and breathing heavily as she takes it. I clutch her as she arches her back to get more or less or beg for a burp. I have finally learned to read her signs. The signs that she needs me.

As she finishes her meal, her eyelids droop, her neverending delicate eyelashes lay for a rest on her cheeks, and her lips loosen. I kiss her head. I place my cheek on her head and realize that this is MY child. For so long, I hugged the children of my friends. I snuggled them for stories. I offered to change their diapers. I even reprimanded from time to time. But this little one is mine. She was made by Husband and me. She grew in my body, stretching it to new capacities, new marks and new pains. She relies on me for so many things.

But as I put her back in her bed, put on a series of lullabies that only I will remember years from now after the batteries in the music player have worn out and rusted over, and gaze at her sprawled out like a starfish escaping into a land of dreams, I realize that I had it wrong. I'm the one who needs her.

The Fear of Becoming a Working Mom

Mothers everywhere do it. They wake up at some unGodly hour so that they can feed their tiny human, wash the smell of spit-up off of their skin (which never truly happens), make themselves look halfway presentable, feed their tiny human again, and then drive off to be in an office for eight hours, realizing that a piece of their heart is still at home. It's not completely impossible to pull off.

But I don't wanna.

My leave ends in 3 weeks. It breaks my heart to think about leaving my little girl and I'm amazed to think of the women around the world who do it. It is an intense love, this motherhood gig. I spend my days watching her sleep, checking that she's breathing, smothering her poor face with kisses, and wondering if I'm doing anything right. I'm pretty sure that I am not. Not a single thing. Even the diapers must be on wrong. It is baffling that one can be covered in spit-up and think, "Okay, throw up all over me if it makes you feel better." And then to prefer that over being at work, earning money, talking to other people. She doesn't talk back yet so my conversations are rather one-sided at the moment. Although I am POSITIVE that she nodded her head in response to my question the other day. She's gifted, I know.

How do women do it? Some women have to go back to work because of money. Others are single parents. And even more just really like working and so they choose to go back. It's a little upsetting to think about how each of these groups judges the others. The happy-to-go-back mom thinks the stay-at-homers are too crunchy and not dedicated to their careers while the stay-at-homers think the happy-to-go-back moms don't really care about their children. The on-her-own mom usually doesn't give a darn because she is too tired to even think about any other mothers. And the desperate-for-money moms sit in a corner crying for whatever reason. Somehow, they all manage. They all get through the day and end up back at home with their babies. How do they do it????

I guess I'll have to figure it out sooner or later. Please pray that it's later. In the meantime, please excuse me while I go watch my baby sleep instead of changing into clothes that do not carry their own distinct scent. Her tiny mouth is so delicious!!!

The Baby That Changed My Life

 

I left Ireland 10 months ago. Last September, we came to the States for a wedding in DC and then to visit the family here in Florida. While here, I was frantically trying to line up interviews so that we could start the process of moving over here. Towards the end of my vacation, I was offered a job! I was finally moving home! After talking it over with Husband, we decided that I would go back to Ireland for a week to say goodbye to the family and our friends, and to help pack up our stuff.

During that week, our lives changed. I had a feeling. A very strong feeling. But I gave it time. You never know when you could be wrong about these things. And then one morning, I peed on a stick. On two sticks, actually. A girl’s gotta be sure. In that moment, my world flipped upside down and tears were inadequate to express my joy. We were pregnant.

Everything from that point was a whirlwind. I left Ireland for good. I came home and started my first job as an attorney. I Skyped Husband as frequently as possible because he wouldn’t be joining me for 2 months. And everywhere in between, I slept. My first trimester was all about sleep and not wanting to eat. I was not one of those girls who threw up 14 times a day, thank goodness. I was the girl who felt nauseated all day, but didn’t throw up. The girl who didn’t want to eat ANYTHING and whose sister, and eventually husband, had to bribe and force her to eat. I was the girl who went to bed at 8pm and was still exhausted for the entirety of the next day. I was the girl who went into bitch mode at the slightest provocation (or Husband’s lack of dedication to engage in a pointless fight), but I’m pretty sure that Husband was used to that after being married to me for 2 years. And then that trimester ended.

The second trimester was pretty uneventful. Kept working. Kept hating my job. Got my energy back. Finally started to gain weight, but very little. Did I forget to mention that I was also THAT girl? Don’t worry. I make up for it in the last month.

At the beginning of my last trimester, I left my job. I was glad to no longer have the stress and to be doing something that I enjoyed more. My energy had again depleted. We had just moved into a new house. But my excitement was rising. We had two baby showers: one thrown by my sister and two best friends, and the second thrown by my parents and aunt and uncle. They were both incredible. We are so blessed. We started receiving amazing gifts from our generous friends, and I started gushing over tiny baby clothes that I thought could never fit a real human being (by the way, one of these ultra tiny outfits was actually TOO BIG for my average sized baby).

I was finally gaining hard core weight. By the time Baby arrived, I had gained 38 pounds! A whole 25 pounds heavier than I have ever weighed in my entire life. Baby was bungee jumping with my sciatic nerve and so I would randomly have pains shoot through my hip and down my leg. Thankfully, this rarely happened when I was driving. My stomach was HUGE. Towards the end, the doctors got a little concerned that I might have preeclampsia. After some delightful testing, they discovered I did not, but ordered me to be a couch potato and work from home. Let me tell you. BOOORRINNNGGG. I spent most of these days on the couch, working, with reruns of Grey’s on in the background. I found I was only comfortable without any pants on. Husband didn’t seem to mind.

My due date finally came. And went. Four days later, my doctor decided we should go ahead and schedule an induction. So on Saturday, June 28^th, we went into the hospital with our bags, nice and calm and laughing, thinking about what would be the best and most difficult parts of having a baby in our lives. We were there by 5:30pm, and by 7pm I was being pumped full of pitocin to start the contractions. I gotta say, I wasn’t in too much pain for about four hours. My friends were not happy about this. I actually told the nurse at one point, “I’m not feeling much. Let’s crank this up a bit!” Yeah, I would soon be eating those words.

Around 11pm, the second my parents and sister left for the night, my stomach exploded in pain. And I spent the next 7 hours trying to avoid an epidural and trying to find a relatively comfortable position for this torturous hell. Nothing worked for too long. Finally, I gave in and got the epidural. The pain was just too much. Thankfully, I went into this process being open to this option and so I wasn’t TOO disappointed with myself. But let’s real, I was pretty disappointed. Unfortunately, it didn’t spread properly. I had one basically non-existent leg and another leg that was sort of numb but attached to a hip that felt like it was being stabbed with someone’s backwoods knife. So they upped the dose and I fell asleep and felt literally nothing (not even the pressure I had come to expect) until around noon.

I was finally completely dilated and ready to push!! It was time to meet our baby! So we pushed. Well, supposedly. I don’t know what I was doing, but I couldn’t feel it, that’s for sure. And after every contraction and attempt at pushing, Baby’s heart rate would drop. This was starting to make me freak out, but I refused to let that fear take over. We gave it some time. Flipped me around to give gravity a chance to work its magic, and tried again. Again, her heart rate was dropping. We tried all kinds of positions. In fact, my doctor told at our appointment this week that I was her most persistent patient in that I wouldn’t give up on doing it naturally and we tried more positions that normal. Her heart rate was still dropping, and now it was starting to get dangerous. This time I was disappointed. We agreed to a c-section, which neither of us had wanted. But we both wanted our little girl and so we moved past the disappointment and prepared for surgery.

It was so weird. I could feel the pressure of them cutting me open, but couldn’t feel any pain. Husband was right next to me the whole time, being just as supportive as he had been through the entire process. I could not have asked for a better partner. And suddenly I heard her crying. It was the most amazing sound. I could not even begin to explain how that felt and there was no point in trying to keep in my tears. She was here. We had been waiting for so long. Exactly 41 weeks. They cleaned her up (after she pooped all over the place on her way to the table) and plopped her right on my chest for some skin-to-skin. I was in awe. Where did she get these amazingly pinchable cheeks? Who is born with such beautiful eyelashes? How can fingers so tiny give me so much joy? Please do not scratch me with your scary talonlike fingernails.

The rest of the day was a blur. Quite literally. I was so drugged up, I don’t remember much else. I can’t really remember if I was holding her in recovery or if she was sleeping. I can’t remember my first time nursing her. But again, I’m the girl that doesn’t care about that. I’m the girl who’s completely obsessed with her baby in the present. I’m sure that will change. At some point, I’ll reflect on everything behind us, and think back to her first steps and words and days of school. At some point, I’ll drop her off at college, and listen to her as she tells me about some guy who has totally stolen her heart. At some point, she’ll marry that boy and pee on two sticks of her own and I’ll think back to the day I found out she would be a part of our lives. But for now, she’s just my little munchkin, sleeping in her bouncer, smiling in her sleep and dreaming her dreams. And I love every moment of it.